The end of innocence

After September 11 2001, wrote Martin Amis, 'all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation'. In fact, many leading American and British novelists felt compelled to confront the implications of that day. Have they succeeded in capturing the new world order, asks Pankaj Mishra

Reflecting on the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, Don DeLillo seemed to speak for many Americans when he admitted that "We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations." On September 11, terrorists from the Middle East who destroyed American immunity to large-scale violence and chaos also forced many American and British novelists to reconsider the value of their work and its relation to the history of the present. "Most novelists I know," Jay McInerney wrote in these pages, "went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center." Ian McEwan claimed in a later interview to have found it "wearisome to confront invented characters". "I wanted to be told about the world. I wanted to be informed. I felt that we had gone through great changes and now was the time to just go back to school, as it were, and start to learn." "The so-called work in progress," Martin Amis confessed, "had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of pitiable babble. But then, too, a feeling of gangrenous futility had infected the whole corpus."

Amis went on to claim that "after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation." This is, of course, an exaggeration. Many writers had intuited that religious and political extremism, which had ravaged large parts of the world, would eventually be unleashed upon the west's rich, more protected societies.

The shock of the attacks was probably greater for writers who had been ensconced deep in what DeLillo in his new novel Falling Man calls the "narcissistic heart of the west". In December 2001, recalling the extraordinarily complacent mood of the decade after the end of the cold war, DeLillo described in these pages how "the surge of capital markets dominated discourse and shaped global consciousness" and how "the dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of cyber-capital."

"Dissent required," Ken Kalfus remembers in A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2005), one of the many recent fictions to deal directly with the attacks on 9/11, "a kind of neurotic, life-denying pessimism". For "unexceptional common sense had demanded that New York slums would be gentrified and that free markets would establish themselves around the world."

A century ago, the first world war, erupting after the earliest phase of globalisation, forced European artists into self-appraisals even more severe than those undertaken by British and American writers after 9/11. Writing to a friend in August 1914 of the "appallingly huge and sudden state of general war" that "has all come as by the leap of some awful monster out of his lair", Henry James confessed to asking himself "if this then is what I have grown old for, if this is what all the ostensibly or comparatively serene, all the supposedly bettering past, of our century has meant and led up to".

As with 9/11, the crisis had been in the making for many years. James's stint in London coincided with the most hectic expansion of global capitalism in history, with rival European businessmen and soldiers corralling the remotest nations into commercial, military and diplomatic networks. In the years leading up to 1914, "social and economic life", as John Maynard Keynes wrote, was internationalised to an unprecedented degree. This first attempt at modernising the globe lasted much longer than the post-cold war era, which ended on September 11 2001. Novelists working within secure national contexts could still appeal to 19th-century notions about the absolute autonomy of art; but they could not remain unaware of the challenges posed to them by the dramatic transformations around them. Human relations may not have shifted as radically on or about December 1910 as Virginia Woolf claimed; they were, however, increasingly subject to new, impersonal forces. Cherishing an apparently stable upper-class English life, James may have, as VS Naipaul recently alleged, "travelled always as a gentleman", observing the world from the top of a carriage. But he couldn't fail to see that much was simmering "irreconcilably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface" of society. In The Princess Casamassima (1888), he ventured into London slums with an unusual cast of anarchist conspirators. His fellow Anglophile novelist Joseph Conrad correctly perceived deracinated revolutionaries as a threat to bourgeois order, and drenched them with irony and scorn in The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911).

It proved much more difficult, however, to reckon, intellectually and artistically, with the first world war, which exposed the bankruptcy of mainstream rather than marginal ideologies in Europe. In the postwar period, the sense of a severe rupture and crisis in civilisation pressed down upon writers as varied as TS Eliot, Thomas Mann, Paul Valèry, Robert Musil, DH Lawrence and Marcel Proust. Writers had to develop new resources - a capacity for abstract thought as well as formal daring - to try to describe how and why human relations had altered in the new conditions of modern life.

Apart from a few expatriates such as Eliot and Gertrude Stein, American writers rarely contributed to this critical reassessment of European modernity - what brought forth the last great flowering of European literature. Success attended - or appeared to attend - their own modern ventures. "Our American world," Saul Bellow once wrote, "is a prodigy" where, "on the material level, the perennial dreams of mankind have been realised." This was - and is - only partly true, as James Baldwin's work would attest. But it is what many Americans believed, which meant that ideas and ideologies of the kind that bloomed in straitened Europe in the 1920s and 30s faded quickly in America, and American novelists remained largely indifferent to the machinery of social and political power. Indeed, America emerged more powerful after each one of the disasters and tragedies suffered by Europe in the first half of the 20th century - part of the country's unique good fortune that continues to make many American writers look to European events, particularly the Holocaust and the gulag, for suitably "serious" themes.

The cold war deepened the isolation of American writers. The decolonisation of Asia and Africa - the central political event of the 20th century - and the erratic progress of postcolonial nations registered faintly in the American literary imagination even as it engaged some of the finest fiction writers in both western Europe (Greene, Burgess, Scott, Camus, Duras) and its former colonies (Achebe, Mahfouz, Naipaul).

Participating in a symposium organised by Partisan Review in 1952, essayist Philip Rahv feared that the growth of American power and wealth would induce among writers the "illusion that our society is in its very nature immune to tragic social conflicts and collisions" and that "the more acute problems of the modern epoch are unreal so far as we are concerned."

America's artificial situation in which, as Reinhold Niebuhr once described it, the "paradise of our domestic security is suspended in a hell of global insecurity" managed to survive even Vietnam. The cold war's climate of political conformity was pierced repeatedly by novelists such as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Mary McCarthy, EL Doctorow, Russell Banks, Robert Stone, Barbara Kingsolver and Joan Didion. Ultimately, however, the tragedy in Vietnam proved too remote to inspire a sustained literary examination of national values and ideals, of the kind that Musil, Mann and Broch had undertaken after witnessing moral and intellectual collapse in their own societies. The most perceptive novel about the American involvement in Vietnam, The Quiet American, was written in 1955 by an English writer: Graham Greene. And the question "why are we in Vietnam?" was answered most eloquently not by imaginative literature, but by works of narrative journalism - David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest and Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie - which placed due weight on the role of ideology and political and social ambition in the lives of men, in this case the businessmen, politicians, bureaucrats, bankers and lawyers of America's ruling elite.

Some of the most interesting young American novelists were alert to the self-indulgent mood of the 90s. Novels such as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (published, coincidentally, on September 11) and Richard Powers's Gain explored the perennial American theme of the gap between reality and the American dream against the context of aggressive new ideologies of profit and materialism. Bret Easton Ellis and Bruce Wagner described the weirder and darker mutations in sensibility and manners in this period.

But, on September 11 2001, these preoccupations were broken into by the previously invisible conflicts and traumas of an interdependent world. "Our world, parts of our world," DeLillo wrote in an article in December 2001, "have crumbled into theirs, which means we are living in a place of danger and rage." But the collision between the paradise of domestic security and the hell of global insecurity had happened long before it horrifyingly manifested itself on 9/11. The cold war and then economic globalisation had knitted the world closer together. Yet the western vision of endless prosperity and well-being had proved a deception for the billions of people living outside the west.

The aggressive paternalism and self-righteousness of American business and politics provoked resentment among even the beneficiaries of an American-ordered world, such as the secular middle-class Turks in Istanbul who told Orhan Pamuk on 9/11 that the terrorists had done the "right thing". (The attacks bring a similar gratification to the Princeton-educated Pakistani financial analyst in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, who, watching the twin towers collapse, finds himself smiling - "remarkably pleased".)

In a world rendered deeply unequal, television and the internet stoked many people's aggrieved sense of being "crowded out", as DeLillo writes in Falling Man, "by other cultures, other futures, the all-enfolding will of capital markets and foreign policies". Reflecting on his compatriots' callous response to 9/11, Pamuk described how an ordinary citizen of the non-western world is today more aware than before "of how insubstantial is his share of the world's wealth; he knows that he lives under conditions that are much harsher and more devastating than those of a 'westerner' and that he is condemned to a much shorter life. At the same time, however, he senses in a corner of his mind that his poverty is to some considerable degree the result of his own folly and inadequacy, or those of his father and grandfather."

"The western world," Pamuk wrote, "is scarcely aware of this overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the world's population." This indifference came to be particularly entrenched in the pre-9/11 decade, when the dotcom boom promised to enlist the entire world in the forward march of western capital and technology.

The internet and the faster movement of capital in a free global market may not have deepened general knowledge of other countries and cultures - the Wall Street speculators in McInerney's The Good Life (2006) are not exceptional in viewing "the world beyond Manhattan primarily in terms of investment and vacation opportunities". But history seemed clearly to have ended after the collapse of communist regimes, leaving the rest of the world with the option of embracing or futilely resisting American-style democracy and capitalism.

These notions were not confined to the large majority of Americans who do not hold passports. Recent fictions set in New York by Deborah Eisenberg and Claire Messud swarm with well-off and politically liberal Americans, who have been gliding "through their lives on the assumption that the sheer fact of their existence has in some way made the world a better place".

These comforting self-images could no longer be maintained after 9/11, especially after the Bush administration decided to remake reality through American firepower, provoking anger and hostility even among people previously indifferent to America. Eisenberg uses a reproachful tone in her short story "Twilight of the Superheroes" to evoke the disabusing of bohemian New Yorkers who have moved, just before 9/11, into an expensive downtown apartment with a glittering view of the city's skyline. ("Towers and spires, glowing emerald, topaz, ruby, sapphire, soared below ... Sitting out on the terrace had been like looking down over the rim into a gigantic glass of champagne.")

"It was as if there had been a curtain," Eisenberg writes, "a curtain painted with the map of the earth, its oceans and continents, with Lucien's delightful city. The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay right behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen by."

A connoisseur of political conspiracy and historical traumas, DeLillo himself seemed a pioneer among writers staking out territories of danger and rage. However, Falling Man, whose elliptical, fragmented narrative follows closely the shattered lives of a couple in New York, shows DeLillo retreating, like McInerney and Kalfus, to the domestic life.

He had hinted at this in 2001 when he spoke of how, for many people, "the event has changed the grain of the most routine moment": "where we live, how we travel, what we think about when we look at our children." Accordingly, Falling Man ignores what a European character in it, a former leftwing terrorist, calls "matters of history, politics and economics - all the things that shape lives, millions of people, dispossessed, their lives, their consciousness". DeLillo confines himself to recording the emotional and existential struggles of 9/11 survivors. (In another striking instance of narrowed focus, McEwan, one of the novelists who after 9/11 had resolved to learn about the "great changes" in the world, prefers in Saturday to describe a day in the life of a London-based neurosurgeon, who seems incapable of grappling with these great changes his creator speaks of.) DeLillo's previous preoccupations clearly made it impossible for him to exclude the 9/11 hijackers from his narrative. But he remains strangely incurious about their pasts and their societies, and he makes little attempt to analyse, in the light of the biggest ever terrorist atrocity, the origin and appeal of political violence.

This may disappoint those who see DeLillo as the prophet of contemporary disorder. But then the resonant views on terror, conspiracy, mass society and art he previously articulated through his characters are metaphysical, even religious, rather than political ("In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act"). These ambitiously theoretical formulations, able, perhaps, to explain the lone assassin or other outcast figures of American history, were likely to prove inadequate before foreign terrorists dealing in mass murder. Not surprisingly, DeLillo ends up relying on received notions about Muslim "rage". ("Late one night he had to step over the prone form of a brother in prayer as he made his way to the toilet to jerk off.")

Amis and John Updike, too, reach for some widely circulated clichés in their fictional accounts of terrorists. Constipation as well as sexual frustration torments Amis's Mohammed Atta who, though preparing to bring down America, is detained by an arcane point about virgins in paradise: "Ah, yes, the virgins: six dozen of them - half a gross. He had read in a news magazine that 'virgins', in the holy book, was a mistranslation from the Aramaic. It should be 'raisins'. He idly wondered whether the quibble might have something to do with 'sultana', which meant (a) a small seedless raisin, and (b) the wife or a concubine of a sultan. Abdul-aziz, Marwan, Ziad, and the others: they would not be best pleased, on their arrival in the Garden, to find a little red packet of Sun-Maid Sultanas (Average Contents 72)."

In his novel Terrorist, Updike appears as keen as Amis to optimise his research. Indeed, he seems to have visited the same websites of Koranic pseudo-scholarship. Invoking the raisin-virgin controversy, one of Updike's fanatical Muslim characters echoes Amis's little joke that the substitution of virgins with dry fruits "would make Paradise significantly less attractive for many young men".

Trying to evoke the puritanical zeal of his characters, Updike distractingly calls attention to his own fussy prose. Here is his attempt to provide an Islamic perspective on overweight Americans: "Devils. The guts of the men sag hugely and the monstrous buttocks of the women seesaw painfully as they tread the boardwalk in swollen sneakers."

If inviting terrorists into the democratic realm of fiction was never less than risky, it is now further complicated by the new awareness of the mayhem they cause in actuality. Their novelist-host has to overcome much fear and revulsion in order to take seriously murderous passions aimed at his own society. Sympathy often breaks down, and hasty research reduces individuals as well as movements to stereotypical motivations.

Struggling to define cultural otherness, DeLillo, Updike and Amis fail to recognise that belief and ideology remain the unseen and overwhelming forces behind gaudy fantasies about virgins. Assembled from jihad-mongering journalism and propaganda videos and websites, their identikit terrorists make Conrad's witheringly evoked revolutionaries in The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes look multidimensional.

However, DeLillo and Updike do acknowledge that novelists are required to set up, within their narratives, a firm opposition to their own feelings and predispositions - a strong character or event that would make the novels transcend their authors' own prejudices. The post-9/11 fictions of McInerney and Jonathan Safran Foer are remarkable in that they strenuously avoid anything too intellectually alien and bewildering. They seem content to enlist the devastation in their city as a backdrop, and both use actual photographs of the event, either on the cover or within the text. But, for all that 9/11 stands for in their sentimental and nostalgic novels about New Yorkers coping with loss, it could be a natural disaster, like the tsunami.

Their mostly affluent characters are too set in their complacent ways - or, as in Safran Foer's novel, simply too young - to stumble into self-knowledge, or to question the assumptions underpinning their previously serene existence. It falls to Kalfus in his novel to train a darkly ironic gaze upon bourgeois self-absorption, of the kind that McEwan leaves unexamined in Saturday. A Disorder Peculiar to the Country describes a couple in the midst of a drawn-out and particularly vicious divorce. (Are we meant to think of domestic discord, also deployed by DeLillo and McInerney, as a metaphor for post-9/11 America?) On the morning of September 11 2001, both husband and wife are incapable of any feeling other than the hope that the planes attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have killed their estranged partner. Their mutual hatred intensifies simultaneously with the Bush administration's rhetoric about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. By the time the assault on Iraq begins, they are whispering to the television "Let's get it over with."

"How far away," Eisenberg asks in her subtly spacious short story, "does something have to be before you have the right to not really know about it." Like Eisenberg, Kalfus has no interest in trying to recreate a pre-9/11 "innocence". Rather, he wishes to explore what it means to be an American in a world shaped by American cultural, financial and military institutions; and he bravely tries to transcend his characters' meagre concerns through authorial broadsides: "You went through your daily life in a haze, knowing that fellow Americans were preparing to race across deserts and jump from planes and kill and die, and elsewhere a man or woman just like you, with kids just like yours, was waiting for this violence to wreck the fabric of a life already as tenuous and complicated as yours."

Kalfus again lapses into over-explicitness when he tries, like DeLillo and Amis, to find the right combination of words that would be worth a thousand images of the atrocity at ground zero. "The writer begins in the towers," DeLillo asserted in December 2001, "trying to imagine the moment, desperately. Before politics, before history and religion, there is the primal terror." A few months later, Amis was wondering: "What was it like to be a passenger on that plane? What was it like to see it coming towards you?" Evidently fuelled by masculine anxiety (both Eisenberg and Messud deal only glancingly with the destruction of the towers), this kind of voyeuristic urge, easily gratified by a video-game or a disaster movie, erupts often in these 9/11 fictions.

"Men," DeLillo claimed in Mao II, "live in history as never before." Yet faced with this fact in real life, DeLillo and others prefer to describe the violence of 9/11 not so much in terms of its historical origins or its ramifications as in its raw physical essence. Rahv once blamed the "peculiar shallowness of a good deal of American literary expression" on the fact that American writers "tended to make too much of private life, to impose on it, to scour it for meanings that it cannot always legitimately yield". In succumbing to what Rahv termed the "cult of individual experience in American writing" the 9/11 writers couldn't be more different from Mann, Musil and many others in Europe for whom the first world war, though an unprecedented calamity, was the point of departure for an investigation of the ideologies, beliefs, and social and political structures of their societies.

Those readers seeking a capacious moral vision in contemporary American literature may have to move out of the narrow category of "9/11 fiction". They can then read, with reconfigured curiosity, Jennifer Egan's Look At Me (2001), which reveals, with unshowy brilliance, how the obsessions with terror, image, novelty and celebrity work out in ordinary American life, creating its particular structures of feeling. There is much rich fiction - Rattawut Lapcharoensap's Sightseeing, Nell Freudenberger's Lucky Girls (2003), Norman Rush's Mortals (2003) - that describes recent American encounters with foreign peoples and cultures. Writers of narrative non-fiction continue to illuminate how the country's ruling class took the country into a suicidal war in Iraq. Chronicling human folly and deception, George Packer, Thomas Ricks and Rajiv Chandrasekaran have produced books as psychologically complex and emotionally vivid as the best works of fiction.

As for Muslim disaffection, the urgent subject of the post 9/11 era, Lorraine Adams's Harbor, Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers and Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits are among many novels that, untouched by the crude hysteria about jihad and Islam, describe sympathetically the divided selves of Muslims in settings as varied as Boston, the north of England and Casablanca.

There are no simple oppositions in these books between "Muslims" and the "west". They simply assume that for many Muslims the west is inseparable from their deepest sense of their selves, and that most people from societies that western imperialism cracked open long ago cannot afford to see the west as an alien and dangerous "other"; it is implicated in their private as well as public conflicts.

Islam, or the "east", has never exerted the same influence on western self-perceptions; they remain empty abstractions, often filled by self-appointed defenders of the western civilisation in order to identify alien and dangerous "others". But, as Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist shows, globalisation and immigration now plunge identities shaped in the west into a fundamental instability. An ivy-league education exalts Changez, the novel's Pakistani narrator, to the American financial elite. Yet he remains restless within his borrowed identity, increasingly aware of the compromises his affiliation with power and wealth enforce in his inner life.

What makes The Reluctant Fundamentalist and other recent novels by Kiran Desai, David Mitchell and Jeffrey Eugenides so uniquely compelling is their intimation of a new existential incoherence, their suspicion that by abolishing old boundaries and penetrating the remotest societies on earth, capitalism and technology have left no "elsewhere", exposing the human self to unprecedented risks and temptations.

In The Inheritance of Loss Desai powerfully evokes the truth of this new spiritual homelessness: "Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that narratives belonged only to herself, that she might create her own mean little happiness and live safely within it." In such recent films as Syriana, The Constant Gardener and Babel even Hollywood seems alert to the fact that the human self, inescapably plural and open-ended, increasingly finds itself in a bewilderingly enlarged and unforgiving arena.

In comparison, most of the literary fiction that self-consciously addresses 9/11 still seems underpinned by outdated assumptions of national isolation and self-sufficiency. The "reconsiderations" DeLillo promised after 9/11 don't seem to have led to a renewed historical consciousness. Composed within the narcissistic heart of the west, most 9/11 fictions seem unable to acknowledge political and ideological belief as a social and emotional reality in the world - the kind of fact that cannot be reduced to the individual experience of rage, envy, sexual frustration and constipation.

But then we haven't moved far in time from 9/11; the younger generation of American writers has yet to reckon with it. Recent novels may turn out to be only the first draft of a rich literature. Certainly, the conditions for it are already present. Writing in 1940, Rahv hoped that American literary life, which was largely determined by national forces, would be increasingly shaped by international forces. In ways still obscure to us, this has begun to happen as American power declines, and old collective assumptions of prosperity and security become unavailable. The present conservative stasis in America has its dangers. But it is unlikely to last. And, as happened after the first world war, uncertainty and confusion in the public sphere may quicken the sense of aesthetic possibility - or, at least, release literary novelists from the dominant American mood of 9/11 commemoration.